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this lightly, and five days is a long time. The slug has been analyzed. It came from a thirty-caliber rifle.”
    “Who manufactured the weapon?”
    “We’re not sure yet. Ballistics is still trying to match the rifling marks on the slug to a specific weapon.”
    “From what distance?”
    “A nearby rooftop.”
    “But then how . . .” I felt my facial muscles tightening and my head throb painfully, so painfully that I had to squeeze my eyes shut to deal with it.
    “You all right?” Gus asked with urgency. He waited a moment and then pushed the call button.
    A nurse rushed into the room and glanced at the heart monitor. “You have to calm down,” she said firmly. “Your blood pressure is way too high.” She called to a second nurse who had just entered the room. “Page Dr. Efram and bring me five milligrams of Valium.” I had an oxygen tube in my nose. She turned up the flow. “Deep breaths, honey. You have a head injury. The last thing you need is more bleeding in your brain. Come on, slowly in and out. Fill your lungs. Hold it . . . Let it out slowly. Again.” The second nurse returned and handed her a syringe. “I’m going to give you a small amount of sedative, just enough to calm you down.” She injected it into my IV line.
    I felt the sedative take hold. My eyelids grew heavy, and I could sense my tension floating away.
    “We have to clear the room,” the second nurse said to Gus.
    He looked terrible as he backed toward the door. “You’ll be fine,” he offered in a soothing tone, but the worry I saw on his face made me think otherwise. How could someone have shot Yana from a rooftop and knocked me unconscious too? Something didn’t add up, but the medication was having its way with me, eradicating worry, removing doubt, and lulling me gently to sleep.

Chapter Three
    I saw Ma the very next morning. She looked surprisingly good for a woman who had lost her NYPD husband and had now come uncomfortably close to losing her only daughter. She had taken Dad’s death really hard. She’d mourned deeply and had never truly felt alive again until . . . my marrying Gus had reignited her pilot light, but it wasn’t until Max’s birth that the flame truly breathed oxygen again and began to burn brightly—and thank God, because she was going down that road of those old Italian widows who dressed in nothing but black all of their remaining days. You know the ones I’m talking about, those women who looked like they were 112 when in fact they were only fifty.
    One of her friends had recently become a widow and was on one of those antidepressants. It wasn’t Paxil or Lexapro. It was one of the newer miracle drugs. I think it was called Darnitol or Screwitol or Hellwithitol, or something equally hopeless sounding.
    Ma scrutinized my face. “You look okay,” she said in a motherly, emotionally fortifying manner. “I knew that all you needed was a good night’s sleep. So, how do you feel?”
    “Like I was hit by a semi that backed up and rolled over me again.”
    “That sounds like an improvement,” she quipped.
    I grinned awkwardly and opened my arms to pull her in. “Come here, you old pain in the butt.” I’m not sure which of us began to cry first, but I think I edged her out by a nose.
    Ma gave us a moment to indulge in emotional catharsis before insisting, “That’s enough of that.” She wiped away her tears. “Are you a cop or a baby?”
    “Right now?”
    She smiled sympathetically and sat down on the bed next to me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You took one hell of a blow to the head. You scared the shit out of us.”
    “I feel so hopeless. I can’t remember anything, not what happened to me or . . .”
    “It’ll come back to you, sweetheart. The doctors said that it would take some time for your memory to return.”
    “I don’t have time. Someone shot my partner. Do you understand how that feels?”
    “Not entirely, but I have some idea. I know it must be eating